We’re Making Some Changes To Make Our Support Even Better

28 Jun We’re Making Some Changes To Make Our Support Even Better

After a lot of deliberation we’ve made the decision to no longer provide inbound phone support. Instead we’ll be focusing on email support and scheduled outbound support calls. We’re making this change to improve the quality of support that we provide to all of our customers.

Inbound phone support has been part of our offering since FlexiTime began back in 2009. My business partner Sam and I spent countless hours on support calls in the early years and there’s no doubt it was extremely valuable for us and our customers as we built the business up.

We’ve always been proud of the support we provide and are regularly humbled by the amazing feedback we receive from people who love dealing with our team. Despite that, we know we can do even better.

Here are some of our support desk stats for May 2018. We answered 75% of email support tickets in less than 1 hour and resolved 38.7% of your support queries in a single reply.

First Reply Time

75% < 1 hour

THIS MONTH

One-touch Resolution

38.7%

THIS MONTH

Those are really good numbers, but we know we can make them even better. We know how important payroll is to your business and when you’ve got a question you want it answered as fast as possible.

To achieve this and to make support fairer for everyone we’ve decided to focus on email as our preferred channel and remove inbound phone support.

When we answer support phone calls it pushes our email support customers down the queue and increases our response time.

We find that our highest quality support interactions happen over email. That way we’ve got time to properly investigate any issues and pass on useful things such as links to help articles, screenshots and step-by-step instructions – which you can then refer back to in the future.

We’ve also found it helps both parties to properly document support interactions. Over the course of a phone call you can cover a lot of different topics and it’s easy to forget certain parts of the conversation. If the discussion is handled over email you can refer back to it later and anyone from our team can quickly pick it up and help with further queries.

Email support allows us to quickly review and prioritise requests and escalate them to the right person if necessary. Our support agents have time to go away and investigate issues so they can come back to you with proper answers.

The vast majority of you have always used email as your primary support channel. We’ve also found that the number of people using phone support has steadily declined in the last few years, despite our customer base growing strongly. We received just over half the number of phone calls per day in May 2018 compared to May 2017.

We know that for some people the preferred learning method is by talking to someone. It may be difficult to explain the problem via email or you just like talking to our friendly support team. No problem, we’re not removing phone support completely. When you want to speak on the phone and have a set of questions that make sense for that type of conversation, you can schedule a call with one of our specialists.

We’ve learned that scheduling a call is more effective for both the customer and the support agent. We can ensure the call is assigned to the person best able to help with your enquiry and they have time to look into the issue before the call. This way when the scheduled time comes both parties are ready and prepared for the discussion. This means faster resolutions and less frustrating phone tag!

We want to provide better answers, faster, and work to continually improve our product and our knowledge base so that you have the information you need in the first place. When you do need to contact us we’re absolutely committed to providing better support than ever.

We hope these changes will have a positive impact on all of our customers, reducing the time it takes for you to satisfactorily resolve your support queries.